30 Oct 04:

Today was our last full day in Firenze - appropriately, the skies cleared and the Sun blessed the city with its warming rays. We had no formal plans for the day, so I hung around the hotel room after breakfast working on the BLOG while my wife went over (just two blocks) to the Duomo Museum. About 11:00 I finished writing and suddenly got an idea for a simplified upload. Along with the BLOG pages, I copied the WS_FTP file transfer software to the pen disk, anticipating I could run it directly from the pen disk at the Internet cafe. Hopefully, I set out.

The arrival of the weekend in conjunction with the beautiful weather had brought EVERYONE out into the sunshine. The streets, piazzas, bars, and ristorantes were jam packed with tourists and locals at densities reminiscent of a cloud of African locusts. Taxis, scooters, bicycles, and horse-drawn carriages fought the current of pedestrians like salmon headed for the spawning ground, only more slowly, vehicular progress measured in just a few meters per second, at most. I elbowed my way through the throngs to the Internet cafe, logged on and attached my pen disk to the computer, and seamlessly uploaded the BLOG. Bravo, bravo! Why thank you...

I figured my wife was unlikely to emerge from the depths of the Duomo Museum for quite a while, so I strolled on down to the Mercato Nuovo (New Market) - this is where all the vendors were involuntarily relocated a while back when the original market that occupied the current-day Piazza Repubblica was plowed under to make way for the open space of the Square. Tightly packed stalls overflowed with all kinds of goods and souvenirs offered at what are called "open" prices - you can bargain, a truly lost art on our side of the Pond. My wife sings in an a capella ensemble in Philly, in which the women wear black gowns and are permitted a scarf for a splash of accessorizing color. I found a real beauty in a diaphonous green silk printed with flowers and freeform linear designs - I managed to talk the vendor (a young signorina) down to about 80% of the asking price, likely overpaying by only 50%. Smugly self-satisfied, I returned to the Piazza Repubblica to hang out there for a while.

As I approached the square, the strains of a Vivaldi string quartet composition graced my ears. Actually, it turned out to be a quasi-quartet, comprising two violins, a viola, and a bass accordian substituting for the cello. All the instruments were electronically amplified, explaining how the stentorous vibrations had reached me long before I reached the Piazza. The first violinist was an amazing virtuoso, and I joined the transfixed crowd surrounding the quartet. I listened to them for over a half hour, during which time they stuck mostly to Vivaldi with some more contemporary pieces interspersed.

Firenze is like that. Everywhere you go you find art, music, theatre - all the irrepressible flowering of the intellectual Springtime of the Renaissance - sprouting from every crevice, bubbling up from every fountain, exuberantly proclaiming that the ground on which you are standing is fecund beyond imagination. The inhabitants are much the same, embued with a vitality owing its roots to the knowledge that they are the inheritors of intellectual, artistic, and political genius. It is a truly humbling experience to travel outside our adolescent and self-absorbed American culture. To begin with, due to a dearth of knowledge of the language and local history and culture one is continually at the mercy of others' hospitality. In our own culture, independence and self-reliance, the quest for material goods, and a secularization of family and public life have distanced us from our own roots. Human beings did not evolve in isolation - we have always needed to belong, to be holistically functioning members of communities that both supply to and derive from others the uniquely human requirements of life. That sense of community has withered deplorably in many segments of contemporary American culture, but it is vibrantly alive in Italy, indeed, in most other parts of the world I have been fortunate enough to experience.

I hooked back up with my wife about 14:00 and we went strolling together. I discovered that the scarf I had bought for her was inappropriate for the ensemble (they require a solid color), so we returned to the Mercato and exchanged it for a (still) very nice scarf of lesser value. To make up the difference, the vendor let me pick out a silk tie. Win-win, eh?

For the remainder of the afternoon we just walked, checking out piazzi and streets we had not yet visited, and stopping from time to time to take photographs or enter a shop for a minor purchase or two. We returned to the hotel at dusk, made dinner reservations, and dressed and ate. Once again, the food was great, the ambience romantic, yada yada yada... I'm going to have to go into food detox when I return just to regain an appreciation for normal culinary fare. Paradise is like that - every day is the same because it can't get any better.

After our 2-½ hour dinner, we returned to the hotel and retired. As the perfect dessert, civil time returned to Standard Time this evening, giving us an extra hour of sleep. Tomorrow we pack and return to Rome, whence we depart for home on Monday.

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